Using Up My Battery

I have been avoiding writing on my phone– as was the plan when I started this blog– because it runs down the battery. I typically leave my room a bit before seven in the morning and return around eleven at night. I am staying in a little white house only a five minute walk from the Bread Loaf Inn– the center of the conference– but rarely have time during the day to make the trip back. That’s a long time for a battery to last– and a long time for my internal battery, too.

I got actual sleep last night– I even dreamed, though they were disturbing dreams. I recall being tol off by one of my favorite students in one dream, and another in which Missie scolded me for not doing a good job babysitting for her, right before she nearly ran her daughter over with her car (though it was– and I remember thinking this in the dream– a pretty cool car. A red new beetle convertible.)

I have a new approach that will hopefully help my mental state while here; something close to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now (which I’ve never actually read but have flipped through in the bookstore quite extensively). I walked to the inn this morning, looking at the birch trees and wondering why morning dew makes my feet itch (and why that fact is not mentioned in the song) and repeated to myself ‘I am here now’, and tried really hard to appreciate that simple fact.

I am not unhappy here. I’m definitely learning a lot, starting to get more rest, and only being bitten by one out of every ten mosquitoe– not 12 out of every ten as was the case in North Carolina. But I am lonely, a little overwhelmed, and quite discontented. Thus the new zen outlook. We shall see how it goes.